Saturday, September 18, 2010

Eric Schmidt on automatic search

Ultimately, search is not just the web but literally all of your information - your email, the things you care about, with your permission - this is personal search, for you and only for you.

"The next step of search is doing this automatically. When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly - 'did you know?', 'did you know?', 'did you know?', 'did you know?'.

This notion of autonomous search - to tell me things I didn't know but am probably interested in, is the next great stage - in my view - of search.

While I agree with the idea of heavily localized and personalized searches, especially on mobile devices, I think this autonomous search feature sounds really annoying. You don't want to get in people's way. You don't want to interrupt them with something unimportant, especially if you are interrupting someone who is trying to get something done.

Perhaps what might be desirable would be better described as recommendations and personalized advertising, not as some Googly version of Clippy popping up and chirping, "Did you know? Did you know?"

Update: Interesting discussion in the comments about whether what Google is building is really personalized advertising, not search.

The amount of personal data available to our digital butlers is skyrocketing, as is the bandwidth between humans and computers.

I can speak to my phone, sending texts to friends or searching for a pancake house without typing a thing. I can take a photo of a business card and it is decoded and the information added to my contact list.

Today it is mostly obvious when you do a search - you go to some search service and type a question. But what happens when search isn't obvious - when you are feeding your computers so much data that it is constantly looking for connections or useful ways of processing it for you?

The novel Accelerando opened with a near-future view that painted a vision of automatic search, and it was about as far removed from clippy as we are from amoeba.

It seems to me that what Google means by 'autonomous search' or 'implicit search' is to automatically formulate a query on a mobile device based on dynamic (real-time) contextual information which is then sent to Google to retrieve a small number of results. A number of patents in this area can be found with the author name Steve Lawrence.

Just read the "The Autonomy of Google And Facebook Services" "http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/10/the_autonomy_of.html". I'm curious to know why you think Eric Schmidt didn't mean "autonomous search" as "personalization and localization of content"?

It could have just been marketing bluster ie. "look how cool it would be to have Google continually tell me all the cool things to see and do while I'm out and about". Instead, he could have said, "When prompted, Google will tell me about things to see and do while I'm out and about" which is less big brother.

In the video of the talk, Schmidt does talk about autonomous search, implicit search, collaborative filtering (CF) and serendipity engine. Putting all this together, it sounds like they are tying implicit search to a CF system.

Hi, Dinesh. If that's what they're doing, I couldn't agree more that it is a great idea! I've been pushing on personalization and localization of information for a long time. What Google is doing sounds like great fun!

It's not totally clear from the outside, but it may be the case that Marissa Mayer is the one leading this effort, moving from her old job as head of user experience across all Google products to leading this effort on localization for mobile devices. Exciting for her!

@ gregFrom this article http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Serendipitous-Search-Plans-Helmed-by-Marissa-Mayer-513716/, it says, "This all happens based on preferences the user has indicated from previous searches that the serendipity engine collected for the user, such as that the user happens to like Italian food."

This is implicit search that I mentioned earlier which is also called autonomous search. Now add location and Google can offer personalized recommendations and/or personalized ads.

Still sounds like personalized advertising, not search, to me. Just look at the example, walking down the street, then being told of an opportunity at a business nearby. That's advertising (unless we want to go as far as to say that advertising is just another form of search, but that starts to get a little vacuous since almost any algorithm can be rephrased as a search algorithm). Anyway, whatever Google wants to call it, it clearly is a very big business for whoever can do it well.